Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/169

Rh exclusively in the fragments of real history it may preserve. Even the myths which it carries down to later times may become important indirect evidence in the hands of the ethnologist. And ancient compositions handed down by memory from generation to generation, especially if a poetic form helps to keep them in their original shape, often give us, if not a sound record of real events, at least a picture of the state of civilization in which the compositions themselves had their origin. Perhaps no branch of indirect evidence, bearing on the history of culture, has been so well worked as the memorials of earlier states of society, which have thus been unintentionally preserved, for instance, in the Homeric poems. Safer examples than the following might be quoted; but as so much has been said of the history of the art of writing, the place may serve to cite what seems to be a memorial of a time when, among the ancient Greeks, picture-writing had not as yet been superseded by word-writing, in the tale of Bellerophon, whom Prœtus would not kill, but he sent him into Lycia, and gave him baneful signs, graving on a folded tablet many soul-destroying things, and bade him show them to the king, that he might perish at his hands.

It happens unfortunately that but little evidence as to the early history of civilization is to be got by direct observation, that is, by contrasting the condition of a low race at different times, so as to see whether its culture has altered in the meanwhile. The contact requisite for such an inspection of a savage tribe by civilized men, has usually had much the same effect as the experiment which an inquisitive child tries upon the root it put in the ground the day before, by digging it up to see